AP

Lisa Van Dusen

May 3, 2022

The bad news for Americans and citizens everywhere who believe in reproductive and privacy rights is that anyone who presumed Donald Trump’s Supreme Court-packing mission as an anti-democracy president included the nomination of justices essentially acting as sleeper agents who would lie about their positions on Roe vs. Wade during their Senate confirmation hearings and then overturn it in practice have proven to be prescient.

The better news is that the draft of that anticipated SCOTUS bombshell — fronted by pre-Trump originalist Samuel Alito, backed by marital conflict-of-interest pioneer Clarence Thomas, brought to you by crucial Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and posted by Politico Monday evening — may sufficiently mobilize small-d democratic engagement ahead of November’s midterms to counter the carousel of pre-emptive propaganda rationales being peddled for an otherwise preposterous victory by the party that has brazenly identified itself as the local franchisee of the global war on democracy, including through the plotting and staging of an attempted coup.

In domestic political terms, the leaked Alito draft threatens to overturn the reproductive rights status quo that has been in place in America since 1973 and that has been relentlessly under assault at the state level by Republican administrations, especially recently. Those measures have included the introduction of vigilantism as a state-backed feature of family planning interference, as well as a significant escalation in restriction tactics involving every aspect of access, including bans on abortion. (The New York Times piece posted Tuesday updating all those measures across the United States).

Six months before November midterm elections that will determine whether the next two years of Joe Biden’s first term will be more or less legislatively intractable than the first two, the sudden emergence of abortion as not just a collateral issue but possibly a ballot question could go — at least at this early writing — in one of two ways.

In an era when technology, corruption and propaganda have combined in a global, anti-democracy power shift away from human beings and toward unaccountable players and governments, women’s rights have become human rights in ways that put the cliché to shame.

The now-immediate, articulated attack on reproductive rights could crystallize the stakes for Democrats and clarify the threat to a range of other rights by a Supreme Court whose Republican majority has overshot the terms of “activism” to become yet another pillar of American democracy corruption captured to act against the interests of the citizens it claims to represent. That may mobilize Democrats to come out in November in numbers so overwhelming that no false narrative rationalizing a GOP victory, no misrepresentation of turnout, can hack the outcome. Or, the emotionally charged and divisive history of the abortion debate will be leveraged to fuel yet another engineered narrative (see entire Trump presidency) that will, in this case, provide a whole new rationale — complete with ludicrous polling, previously unthinkable headlines and scenery-chewing performative lunacy — for a Republican result in November that makes absolutely no sense in any sane, authentic context. If that option transpires, we’ll know that the current Republican outcry over the leak of the Alito draft was both disingenuous and misdirectional.

In the larger context of the global war on democracy waged by hypercorrupt intelligence, political and geopolitical players over the past two decades, overturning Roe vs. Wade exemplifies the psychological warfare aim of all disruptive, shock-and-awe attacks on democracies everywhere these days. It also fulfills the wider systemic aim of gradually reconciling human rights norms across the world with those in authoritarian regimes — notably aspiring superpower China — and accelerates the trend toward privacy annihilation and granular control over bodies of all kinds, not just women’s bodies, that defines the 21st-century post-democracy model of totalitarian surveillance states that has been encroaching on freedom across the world. In related content, here’s CNN’s must-read China says it’s restricting abortions to promote gender equality. Experts are skeptical, from October. “The female body has become a tool,” said one woman quoted in the story. “When (the state) wants you to bear a child, you must do it at all cost. When (the state) doesn’t want it, you’re not allowed to give birth even at the risk of death.”

Some observers are already reading the Alito draft as an attempt to undo decades of progress and return to a past of criminalized choices forced on women who are not criminals. In this unprecedented context, the debate over reproductive rights isn’t only about religion, when life begins, feminism, birth control or whether you would or wouldn’t have an abortion yourself. In an era when technology, corruption and propaganda have combined in a global, anti-democracy power shift away from citizens and toward hypercorrupt, unaccountable players and governments, women’s rights have become human rights in ways that put the cliché to shame.

This is not about the past, it’s about a future whose post-democracy characteristics will include — if we look to its prototypes and proponents for guidance — state interference in the lives of citizens far more insidious, invasive and exploitive than anything the past has seen, anywhere.

In America right now, rolling back abortion rights isn’t an endgame. After the voting rights and LGBTQ rights that are also under attack, it’s just the next, most obvious target.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington/international affairs columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.